Lapis Lazuli
by ThePaperBagPrincess
Summary: Summer. London.  All Lucy Weasley wants is to return to her beloved countryside and paint, but she's stuck here until September.  Until a discovery in the garden leads her into a world of a very different sort of magic...


**Lapis Lazuli**

**A/N: Written for PrincessPearl and Beth's HPxNarnia crossover challenge. I was given the prompts reach, scars and young, and he pairing Lucy/Tirian, but it's turned into a multi-chap (hopefully not a very long one), so you'll have to wait for them.**

**For this story I have made the slight (and I hope, forgiveable) alteration to canon in making Lucy the elder of Percy's daughters.**

**This chapter is a sort of prologue I suppose.**

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**Chapter 1: Payne's Grey**

She found them at the bottom of the garden.

It was the summer at the end of her Third Year and they'd just moved from Devon to London. Moved from the rolling green countryside, full of fresh air and open spaces, to the city; crowded, noisy, and grey, grey, grey.

The house had belonged to a Wizarding family, way back, according to the stories, but the line had died out with a squib, and the house had been sold to Muggles. It had never lasted long in one family though, because the wizards who had owned it had, at some point, put a strong charm on the attic, meaning that it changed size in a way that disconcerted each Muggle family so much that they eventually moved on. There were also rumours about a tree that had stood in the garden and moved mysteriously with a wind that did not exist.

Eventually, the Ministry investigated and bought it themselves, selling it on to Wizards and, when they were unable to undo the charm on the attic, making it one of those properties which it was illegal to sell to Muggles.

Anyway, magical or not, Lucy didn't want to be there.

This fact had led to several flaming rows with her father, to whom his elder daughter was a complete mystery. He had never understood how she could concentrate for hours on a painting, and yet still get complaints from her teachers about her attention span, or how she could go from dreamy playfulness to an explosion of temper in a couple of seconds flat, or how she could be the daughter who wore pretty feminine clothes and put ribbons in her hair, but who also regularly forgot to brush the hair before the ribbons went in, wiped her paintbrushes on the pretty clothes and would join in enthusiastically with rough and energetic games.

And he did not have a creative or imaginative bone in his body, so he was unable to understand, either, exactly what she had loved so much about Devon, and why she therefore felt so stifled in the city.

It wasn't that she didn't love him, or thought that he didn't love her, but she knew that they would never really understand each other. Sometimes that made her sad, but at other times it frustrated her until she just exploded.

She had finally retreated from this one, before she did something stupid like try to hex him, and gone into the garden. Some garden, she thought bitterly. A strip of scrubby grass and a few shrubs. Even the tree that was said to have moved without the wind had gone, although there was an ancient looking stump at the bottom of the garden, and she wondered if that had been it.

Sitting on the stump, she wished miserably that they had never come. And she had the whole bloody summer holiday stretching out ahead of her before she went back to Hogwarts. She could go and visit her cousins of course, but still... Most of the time, it would just be her and Molly, who was small and sweet and good and oh-so-ordinary, and quite clearly the favourite child, as far as their father was concerned. Lucy loved her little sister, but sometimes she felt like a great unwieldy cuckoo child (even though she was neither great not unwieldy, being built small and slim, with a figure that was far too much like that of a small boy for a fourteen-year-old girl).

All she could see was the street outside the gate and the houses opposite, and a few stunted trees that grew along the pavement. It didn't make her want to paint, and when a place didn't want to make her paint it, she knew that she could never live there. It made her feel empty and dry inside, as though she was a palette with the colours left on to harden. What colour would she even paint this city? All she could think of was Payne's Grey, the most uninspiring colour with the most uninspiring name.

Her paints still lay unpacked in their case upstairs.

She scuffed her heel idly against the ground at the bottom of the stump and was surprised when it hit something. She assumed it was a root at first, and merely pushed her toes against it. That was when she realised that it had a sharp corner on it. For a moment, she looked down at it, not really taking in what she was seeing.

There was something buried here. With a sudden flash of excitement (she loved finding things), she slipped off the tree stump and crouched on the ground. Lucy had never been afraid of getting her hands dirty, so she did not think twice about digging away at it with her fingers, and it wasn't long before she realised what she was digging out.

It was a box. A wooden box with a carved lid. The clasp was rusted after lying in damp earth, but with a bit of a struggle, she pulled it open. A piece of paper with slightly old-fashioned handwriting on it lay on the top, and Lucy lifted this to find what was underneath.

Rings. A set of beautiful, old fashioned rings, set with coloured stones of some sort. Lucy was a witch; she should have known better than to touch an unknown piece of jewellery that she had found buried in the garden of a house that had once belonged to a magical family. But she was mesmerised by the beauty of the rings, reached out a hand, picked one up and idly slipped it on.

Then the world shifted.

She was in water, and her brain panicked before she could even begin to wonder what was happening. But it only lasted a moment before she was rushing upwards, and was suddenly standing in a still pool, up to her ankles. The light was dim, and it was very quiet, and the first thing that came into her mind, in a rush of relief, was that she was finally back in the countryside.

Something told her that it wasn't Devon though.


End file.
